In March, Bluesky’s longtime CEO, Jay Graber, stepped down from that role to become its chief innovation officer. Graber was immediately succeeded by Toni Schneider, the founding CEO of Automattic, which is the company behind WordPress and Tumblr.

Schneider, who has led the company as interim CEO for the past four months, is now dropping the “interim” status and becoming its permanent chief executive.

“I’m four months into my interim CEO role at Bluesky, and it’s time for an update,” Schneider wrote on his personal blog. “Most importantly, as of today, the interim part of the title is gone. I’m loving the mission and the job, and I’m all in as Bluesky’s official CEO.”

In the post, Schneider said that one of his first orders of business is to “create smaller spaces and more private communities,” which he said would “unlock the next wave of growth and innovation.”

Automattic and True Ventures, which is a venture capital firm where Schneider is a partner, are both investors in Bluesky.

Bluesky, which was originally spun off from Twitter, became a haven for those who wished to avoid the changes Elon Musk brought to the platform after he took it over in 2022 (the site was eventually renamed X and now it is a subsidiary of Musk’s combination rocket and AI company, SpaceXAI).

Under Graber, the site grew to 43 million users, while the site’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol — a system that lets Bluesky and other apps share the same social network — was significantly expanded.

Lately, though, the site has struggled to retain or grow its user base. Some have questioned whether it is dying — pointing to apparent declines in both engagement and its overall community of users. Bluesky saw a sharp rise in users in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election (when Elon Musk was most active in politics), but the site appears to have seen a drop off since then.

In short: Schneider will have his work cut out for him. He seems game for it, though. “We’re at the very beginning of this story,” he wrote Friday.

Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models. 

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talked to Delangue about why the open vs closed source fight matters in the wake of Anthropic’s halted Fable release, and why he’s worried about the possibility that a handful of big companies could end up controlling everything. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

Apple filed a lawsuit Friday against OpenAI over allegations of trade secret theft and breach of contract.

The iPhone maker alleges that this misconduct, which it says reveals a pattern of theft from OpenAI employees who previously worked at Apple, was directed by OpenAI’s senior leadership, including Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses Tan of using Apple’s confidential project code names during OpenAI’s recruiting process, asking job candidates to bring in Apple hardware components to their interviews, coaching departing Apple employees on how to evade the company’s security procedures, and asking for details about the company’s unannounced products.

Before joining OpenAI, Tan had spent 24 years at Apple, most recently as VP of product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch.

The accusations come at a time when OpenAI is rumored to be developing its first hardware product, which would likely compete with the iPhone. In April, industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested this device could be a smartphone that would rely on AI agents instead of apps. If true, it would be one of the largest threats to Apple’s core hardware business to date.

Apple’s former lead designer Jony Ive’s device startup io was acquired by OpenAI last year in a $6.5 billion deal to aid the AI company with its hardware ambitions. While io was named in the filing, Ive was not.

Tan is not the only OpenAI employee referenced in the new complaint. Apple also alleges that Chang Liu, who spent eight years at Apple as a senior systems electrical engineer, failed to return an Apple-issued laptop after leaving the company for OpenAI in 2026 and had used the computer to download confidential Apple technical documents.

Apple says in the complaint that the stolen documents included information about unannounced technologies, features, and products, including technical specifications, engineering presentations, and proprietary project data.

Liu is also accused in the lawsuit of sharing Apple’s confidential information with other Apple employees applying for jobs at OpenAI, advising at least one of them on what to study before their interview.

Apple sent a letter to OpenAI in February to raise its concerns, and received no response, the company said in the complaint.

It alleges that the behavior of these former employees is part of OpenAI’s strategy to extract Apple’s confidential information, which included asking Apple employees to bring designs and prototypes to their interviews, and answer questions about things like component and vendor selection processes.

Apple says its ongoing investigation revealed that OpenAI and its partners have even used Apple’s confidential information while the AI model maker develops its own hardware product. For instance, the filing references a proprietary metal finishing technique that was used by OpenAI after it allegedly misled a partner into believing it had Apple’s permission to do so.

Like many tech companies, Apple typically investigates potential trade secret theft or other improper activity by analyzing communications that took place on company-owned devices and reading through its server logs. By taking the case to court, Apple will have an opportunity to learn more about the extent of the alleged operation through the legal discovery process.

Apple is asking the court to bar OpenAI from using or disclosing its trade secrets, require the company to return any confidential Apple materials, and preserve evidence related to the case.

“This is the tip of the iceberg. Apple lacks visibility into what’s been happening behind closed doors at OpenAI, where such misconduct is normalized and exemplified by leadership,” the filing states. “As a natural result, OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets.”

In a prepared statement, Apple also said the following:

“At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously. Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. We will always defend our teams’ hard work and innovations, and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so.”

OpenAI was asked for comment.

This story is developing and will be updated.